It's Cautiously into the Dark
by Oceans in Hand
Summary: When he got his first good look at Lucy's Priest he thought, this man will save her. This man will drive the vamps away from Augustine, and back into our nightmares. Hicks/Priest preslash, Hicks/Lucy.


**it's cautiously into the dark**

When he got his first good look at Lucy's Priest he thought, _this man will save her. This man will drive the vamps away from Augustine, and back into our nightmares._

But he didn't. He wouldn't. Hicks left the city struggling with a sense of hopelessness.

Not for long, though. A few miles. He wasn't particularly given to gloom and discouragement, no more than he was to taking his problems to others. So the Priest wouldn't help? Forget him. Silly of Hicks to depend on the Church in any capacity.

**x**

Still, he was happy to have him along when the man showed up. Happier as it began to seem more and more unlikely that he would have managed on his own. Reading vamp tracks? Yeah, he could do that, could follow 'em for a bit before figuring out to head for the reservation. He could have explored the surface level. He could have spoken to the familiar with the scary chopper.

But climb down into the reservation proper? By himself, and of his own initiative? Eeh. Maybe.

And when the straggler vamps had come out, shit. It wouldn't have been the first one that got him, maybe not even the second, but...He wouldn't let pride get in the way of life or death reality. He doubts he would have survived his first vampire encounter.

**x**

He figures it was sometime after that that Hicks began to...look. At first that's all it was-looking. But over the course of the long ride to Mira Sola, where there was nothing to else to do, nothing to distract him from constant thoughts of Lucy, looking became studying. The bend of the Priest's body over his bike's engine, his fingers hooked around the handles. The hard slice of his mouth and deep lines where he squinted against the dust and glaring light, around his lips and eyes beneath the wide lenses of his goggles.

Studying, as they trooped towards the mountainous hive, that morphed into a burning curiosity of _texture_. What would the sturdy fabric of his hooded robe feel like, to the softer pads of his fingers? The ridges of scar tissue, on his hands and neck?

And in between watching the Guardian and beating down the small mammal panic he felt at the sight of it, the sound of it's trilling roar, and watching the newly appeared Priestess with appreciation and some amount of awe, he marveled at the resounding pound of the Priest's boots on harden vamp slime. The subtle, ropey strength of his arms.

And then he had to duck, because things were being thrown and Hicks didn't want to be scowled later for not doing so.

**x**

Jericho frightened him. Not like the vamps did, or the Guardian. It wasn't the tensed-for-flight kind of apprehension with which he dealt with familiars either, though a similar kind of beast. As he paced the streets of the eerily silent city, he hunched his shoulders against the creep of eyes on his back. He regarded the shadows with long, mistrusting looks, and struggled with his Outlander's superstition to properly search the homes. Jericho was a town of the dead and ghostly now. He was trespassing.

Hicks' skin crawled as his mind screamed _Get out! Leave!_

But he ignored it, and continued to poke through the refuse.

**x**

Hicks heard himself. He took in the faces of the Priest and Priestess, the hard expressions and the impatience. The smudge of sympathy in the Priestess's eye fueled his irrationality-because he knew that's what it was, knew that if Lucy wasn't Lucy anymore when they found her...

But until then, he would fight. And argue and plead, and cajole. To do otherwise would be a betrayal. And...there was something about the Priest's air that made him balk, some quality of wrongness that spurred him on.

**x**

Learning that the man he was fast developing a like for was the father of the woman he loved was, well. It was a doozy, whatever else it was.

Hicks' mind spun at the Priestess's admission for a surprisingly short moment, before the part of him that knew that an infected Lucy would have to be executed, that that third or fourth vamp would have put him down simply goes, _oh_. Suddenly he saw an overwhelming resemblance.

Well, shoot. No fucking _wonder_.

He saw Lucy's spirit in those startlingly old eyes, the ferocity that had first drawn him to her. Her stubbornness in the set of the Priest's shoulders. Her determination to be strong in in the deceptively limp hang of his fingers.

Hicks wondered why everything was backwards, why he saw the girl in her father instead of the other way around. Why he found it so difficult to flip it rightways.

**x**

Was he obligated to tell Lucy? That he wasn't...happy, to hear that the queen was still out there, but satisfied. Pleased in a weird, vaguely bloodthirsty way. He wasn't ready to return to sheriffing Augustine, and Hicks was privately thrilled to find that Lucy was of a mind. They would make a helluva couple he thought, smug. After some training. And he hadn't seen the last of the Priest, an inevitability he had been anticipating with something like dread.

Nah. He didn't have to tell her, Hicks decided as they stood up on of the familiars' bikes together. Not that he'd probably love her father as much as he did, in the same way as he did her, one day. Sooner rather than later if he had his guess.

When the Priest and the Priestess turned their cobbled together bikes towards Cathedral City, Hicks stopped them to shake hands. He took the Priestess's first, smiling into her kind eyes and wishing he had the nerve to hug her like he wanted to. He settled for squeezing her fingers with as much warmth and gratitude as he could possibly imbue in the gesture, and took heart from the understanding curl of her lips.

Then he took the Priest's and, for a long moment, just watched their gripped hands. He squeezed the older man's as well, shushed the part of himself that relished even that small, casual contact, and did not smile when their eyes met.

"Be seeing you." He said, and meant it. The Priest puzzled over the vehemence of his tone in his shuttered, quiet way, and nodded.

"I'll count on it," he replied, and then Hicks smiled.

* * *

><p><strong>...I'll admit it. The slash goggles were firmly in place.<strong>

**-Oceans**


End file.
